Tinker Bell – Nerdisthttp://nerdist.com
Fri, 09 Dec 2016 13:00:33 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.1Inked Wednesday #60 – NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS Meets STAR WARShttp://nerdist.com/inked-wednesday-60-nightmare-before-christmas-meets-star-wars/
Thu, 22 Oct 2015 02:30:42 +0000http://nerdist.com/?p=322578Director Henry Selick recently settled a very important question about The Nightmare Before Christmas. Is it a Halloween movie or a Christmas movie? Selick says Halloween. This is loosely related to today’s Inked Wednesday because we have a super awesome Jack Skellington and Sally tattoo. The characters from Nightmare are in costume as Han Solo and Princess Leia. Seeing this creative mash-up makes me want to rewrite the entire Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack with a Star Wars twist. I’ll start working on that in all of my free time.

Meanwhile, please admire the Han Skellington and Sally-Leia ink below and visit the rest of the gallery to see a rad Kenner tattoo (as in the toy manufacturer), a neat Avengers assemble design, a gorgeous Hawkgirl, and more.

Have nerd-themed tattoos? Or are you a tattoo artist who has a portfolio of geeky tattoos? I want to see them! Leave links to pictures or galleries in the comments, tag me in comments or images on Instagram, or send photos to me on Twitter. I’ll save them to include in a future Inked Wednesday gallery.

]]>Cosplay Friday #133 – Jack and Sally, Skull Kid, & Morehttp://nerdist.com/cosplay-friday-133-jack-and-sally-skull-kid-more/
Sat, 05 Sep 2015 02:30:22 +0000http://nerdist.com/?p=301174Cosplay Friday comes together from various places across the web. Good costumes are shared on a variety of websites, and I pull my favorites at random. Sometimes the gallery ends up with an unintentional theme, and this week, it’s mostly about gaming. Video games such as League of Legends, Final Fantasy, and The Legend of Zelda offer tremendous amounts of inspiration. I constantly see cosplayers interpreting different characters from all those titles, and the outfits never look the same. I’m convinced League of Legends has a million different skin combinations. Anyway, the below picture is one example of a costume I haven’t seen done in this exact way before. It’s a somewhat cheerful looking Skull Kid from Majora’s Mask.

Don’t forget to view more costumes in the gallery below–especially that Jack and Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas. Remember that if you are a cosplayer or a cosplay photographer and would like to see your work featured in an upcoming Cosplay Friday, head to the comments and leave a link to photos or hit me up on Twitter.

]]>The Shelf: FOXCATCHER, SPACE DANDY, BLACULAhttp://nerdist.com/the-shelf-foxcatcher-space-dandy-blacula/
http://nerdist.com/the-shelf-foxcatcher-space-dandy-blacula/#commentsTue, 03 Mar 2015 20:00:32 +0000http://www.nerdist.com/?p=229057A weird coincidence about this week’s mostly-disparate Blu-ray releases is that they seem to be about men who are in some way crazy and obsessed. That’s something, isn’t it? Anyway, an Oscar-nominated film leads off things this week, plus an anime that’s more fun than it probably has any right to be, and a two-pack of Blaxploitation horror films that are mostly silly but still a lot of fun. Let’s dive in!

Foxcatcher
One of the strangest stories in American sports, if you can even say that it is about sports. Foxcatcher is based on the true case of millionaire recluse John du Pont (Steve Carell) who was obsessed with Greco-Roman wrestling and brought in Olympic medalist Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) to be on the team he was founding, called “Team Foxcatcher” named after the compound he insisted all his wrestlers live on. While du Pont fancied himself a sportsman and a mentor to Mark, he actually was more interested in Mark’s older brother David (Mark Ruffalo) who had a job and a family elsewhere. Eventually David did get involved in the team, which, of course, ultimately led to a bizarre tragedy.

Steve Carell, Mark Ruffalo, Director Bennett Miller, and the screenplay and makeup were all nominated for Oscars this year for their work on Foxcatcher. And fair enough; it could all be pointed to as exemplary. I just wish the movie hung together at all for me. I can’t really point to a reason why, but I guess I just wasn’t captivated by much in between the good things. It’s a very slow-moving film, much slower than Miller’s other laconic features Capote and Moneyball. There’s what has to be a full five-minute sequence of the Schultz brothers wrestling at the beginning of the film, and it’s supposed to show the athleticism and the rivalry already in place, but it also just kind of goes on and on.

Wouldn’t ever say this was a bad movie, because it clearly isn’t, it just didn’t rise about the aesthetic and the mannered performances into something that felt real. Your mileage may vary.

Space Dandy Season 1
Judging by the premise (a bounty hunter, of sorts, in outer space who flies around with a colorful crew of weirdos) and the director (Shinichiro Watanabe of Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo), I went into Space Dandy with a certain preconceived notion about what I’d be getting. Man alive, I was not prepared for the utter whacked-out nutsness that was to follow. This is one of the funniest and weirdest anime I think I’ve ever seen, and it’s got more meta humor in it than most episodes of Community.

Like the opening narration says, Space Dandy is a dandy guy from space. He is a mix between Fonzie, Spike Spiegel, and a huge moronic douchebag, who is one of a slew of alien hunters in the galaxy, trying to find rare alien species for cataloging purposes. He really only does it to get paid so that he can go to his favorite restaurant–BOOBIES– a place with scantily-clad waitresses and…well, that’s kind of it. He’s joined on his quest in his ship, the Aloha Oe, by his faithful robot QT and an alien cat they picked up named Meow. The stakes and circumstances mostly change in each episode, but those core things stay the same, as does the continuing appearance of Dr. Gel of the Gogol Empire who flies in a ship that looks like the Statue of Liberty’s head and for some reason wants to kill Dandy.

Each episode almost exists in its own vacuum and many episodes end with Dandy and/or the rest of the crew and/or everyone in the galaxy dying, only to return next time like nothing had happened. For instance, the fourth episode, “Sometimes You Can’t Live with Dying, Baby” (all the episode titles end with the word “Baby”), Meow is bitten by an alien zombie and transforms into one, eventually turning everyone in the surrounding area, including Boobies, into zombies. The rest of the episode plays out like a silly Dawn of the Dead until no one’s left but the narrator. Another episode, “A Race in Space Is Dangerous, Baby” ends with Dandy being propelled billions of years into the future where he finds a statue of Buddha that looks like him.

Still, amid all the silliness and references to mecha anime and Glee and a million other things, there’s a surprising amount of heart in the show, and each of the characters has at least one episode to be real people and not just caricatures.

I like this show a lot, baby.

Blacula/Scream Blacula Scream Double Feature
There was a whole underrepresented filmgoing market that was finally being catered to in the early ’70s. Not in huge numbers, and not by very reputable companies, but the African American audience wanted to see themselves represented on screen, and thus, the blaxsploitation film was born, being both exploitation movies about black people and movies that exploited the black audience’s eagerness to spend money. There were plenty of action flicks in the genre, and were usually about streetwise tough people like Shaft or Superfly, but there were other genres waiting to get used also, and in 1972, the first blaxsploitation horror flick emerged, with the suitably exploitative title of Blacula.

This is a movie that’s mostly silly, but can actually be applauded in a few areas. Firstly, and most prolifically, for its two lead male actors. William Marshall, a classically-trained and very regal figure, portrays the African prince who was turned into a vampire by Dracula himself hundreds of years ago. As the story goes, it was Marshall who wanted his character to be aristocratic and ancient, and the script was changed from a modern day blue collar worker, giving Blacula (God help me) a bit more gravitas. Marshall famously went on to play the King of Cartoons on Pee-wee’s Playhouse. The other actor, portraying the doctor who acts as the Van Helsing of the piece has the greatest stage name of all time: Thalmus Rasulala. Rasulala was never a household name, even if he should have been, and gave the character a real-world edge. Between the two of them, they help to ground an otherwise absurd film.

There are also some pretty effective scare moments, namely when Blacula wakes up from his coffin and feeds for the first time, and (which you can see in the trailer below) when the vampire woman wakes up in the morgue and screams bloody murder as she runs toward camera in slow motion. That is some scary shit right there.

Blacula proved successful enough that a sequel was made the following year, entitled Scream Blacula Scream. Again starring Marshall, the film has the defeated vampire prince awakened via voodoo magic to begin his reign of terror anew. A young and hot Pam Grier plays the female lead this time out.

Both of these movies are much more interesting culturally than they are good examples of horror or blaxploitation, really, but they’re certainly much better than stuff like Blackenstein, Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde, and Abby, which was alternately known as Black Exorcist. Seriously, those are real movies. Scream Factory has put out both Blacula films on a single disc, with a very informative commentary on the first film and an interview with a supporting actor from the second.

Outlander Season 1 Volume 1 – She’s a time traveler who is married in 1945 and then gets sent back, inexplicably, to 1743 where she has to marry a different fellow, and there’s lots of sex because it’s on Starz.

]]>http://nerdist.com/the-shelf-foxcatcher-space-dandy-blacula/feed/3Exclusive: TINKER BELL AND THE LEGEND OF THE NEVERBEAST Deleted Scenehttp://nerdist.com/exclusive-tinker-bell-and-the-legend-of-the-neverbeast-deleted-scene/
http://nerdist.com/exclusive-tinker-bell-and-the-legend-of-the-neverbeast-deleted-scene/#commentsFri, 27 Feb 2015 18:30:59 +0000http://www.nerdist.com/?p=228222Last year, I wrote about The Pirate Fairy, and how it brought us one step closer to STEM fairies. This week we’ll be looking at the latest offering from Pixie Hollow: Tinker Bell and the Legend of the NeverBeast. This one turns the spotlight on animal talent fairy Fawn (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin), and her tendency to take in and foster dangerous animals.

Here’s Fawn teaching “Gruff” about the constellations:

And here we find out more about the Legend of the NeverBeast:

The Blu-Ray/DVD comes out on March 3rd, but in the meantime here’s an exclusive clip of a deleted scene from the film. Here, we see Fawn try to win over the NeverBeast with offerings of food – and find out why, in the end, DisneyToon decided it wasn’t helping move the story along.

Get ready to enjoy a little faith, trust and pixie dust in less than a week!

]]>http://nerdist.com/exclusive-tinker-bell-and-the-legend-of-the-neverbeast-deleted-scene/feed/1Ginnifer Goodwin Will Voice Fairy in TINKER BELL AND THE LEGEND OF THE NEVERBEASThttp://nerdist.com/ginnifer-goodwin-will-voice-fairy-in-tinker-bell-and-the-legend-of-the-neverbeast/
http://nerdist.com/ginnifer-goodwin-will-voice-fairy-in-tinker-bell-and-the-legend-of-the-neverbeast/#commentsSun, 26 Oct 2014 18:00:15 +0000http://www.nerdist.com/?p=195376Disney announced Friday that Once Upon a Time’s Ginnifer Goodwin will voice Fawn, Tinker Bell’s animal fairy friend, in Tinker Bell and the Legend of the NeverBeast due for in-home release on March 3rd, 2015. The film will also introduce Gruff, the newest member of the Disney menagerie, and if you’re anything like me, you’re going to watch the teaser below, pause on Gruff, and immediately say, “I want one.”

According to the press release, Gruff is a massive creature who lives in a lair near the fairies’ home. When Fawn – who has a penchant for thinking with her heart and not her head and breaking rules if it means saving the day – tracks down the source of a distant roaring she hears, she discovers Gruff, a creature with glowing green eyes and a habit of stacking rocks.

“Fawn was inspired by my daughter and her unconditional love of animals,” Director Steve Loter says in the press release. “But Ginnifer had a very strong hand in crafting the character. Her sense of fun and her wondrous view of the world gave Fawn direction. You can hear the smile in Ginnifer’s voice—this is a character that loves life and lives it to its fullest.”

Now tell me you’re not dying for a Gruff of your very own! Which Disney animal is your favorite? Tell us in the comments below!

]]>http://nerdist.com/ginnifer-goodwin-will-voice-fairy-in-tinker-bell-and-the-legend-of-the-neverbeast/feed/1ONCE UPON A TIME Cosplay Galleryhttp://nerdist.com/once-upon-a-time-cosplay-gallery/
http://nerdist.com/once-upon-a-time-cosplay-gallery/#commentsWed, 24 Sep 2014 21:30:20 +0000http://www.nerdist.com/?p=185653Get ready, dearies, because Once Upon a Time returns for season four Sunday, September 28. Your favorite heroes and villains from fairy tales and legends will return with some new Frozen friends. One of my favorite things about the magical series is seeing what costume designer Eduardo Castro and his team create for the cast.

The ensembles often have familiar elements from animated Disney films but are also fresh and creative. The Evil Queen’s costumes are especially stunning, and I’ve seen more and more cosplayers dress like her and other characters in the series. To celebrate the upcoming season premiere, I’ve rounded up some of the best examples of Once Upon a Timecosplay in the below gallery.

Disney princesses are everywhere, and the toy aisle is super saturated with their altered visages. (I’m not including Anna & Elsa in this group – they’ve yet to go through the princess machine.)

Meanwhile, lurking in a straight to DVD purgatory are the Disney Fairies. Why? I just don’t get it. The Tinker Bell movies are great, and I’ve long been arguing that Tinker Bell, with her “tinkering” talent, teaches kids that it’s cool to be an engineer. And now with the introduction of Zarina, a/k/a “The Pirate Fairy,” it feels like we’re actually getting closer to STEM talent fairies.

The Tinker Bell movies take place in the world of “Peter Pan” – the fairies are denizens of Neverland, and reside in Pixie Hollow. Each fairy has their own “talent” that helps keep things moving along in Pixie Hollow, as well as the rest of the world. In other words, they a) have JOBS and b) have to work together to make things happen, like, the seasons that we mortals on the “Mainland” count on. In the middle of Pixie Hollow is the Pixie Dust Tree, from which, you guessed it, flows the pixie dust that the fairies rely on for everything. And, as we learned in Tinker Bell and The Lost Treasure, the tree needs an infusion of blue pixie dust to keep pumping out the glitter. Blue pixie dust is serious business and extremely potent. You don’t mess with it.

MILD SPOILERS IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPHS

Zarina (voice of Christina Hendricks) is a dust-keeper fairy with an insatiable curiosity about how pixie dust works, and spends her days experimenting with her own rations of dust trying to change its composition. Questioning authority gets her into trouble, and she runs away from Pixie Hollow to join forces with… gulp… pirates. (Fairies HATE pirates.) After Zarina steals the supply of precious blue pixie dust, Tinker Bell (voice of Mae Whitman) and her friends set off to find her, and end up head-to-head against a band of pirates led by a cabin boy named James (voice of Tom Hiddleston), who eventually turns into the Captain Hook we’re all familiar with.

The movie has plenty of nice nods and tie-ins to the original Peter Pan. Tom Hiddleston is fabulous as young Hook, and does justice to Hans Conried, the original voice of that old Codfish. And we’re even treated to the origin story of the Tick-Tock Crocodile. Plus, Zarina, declaring that her new talent is Alchemy, becomes a great jumping off point for teaching kids about basic laboratory techniques, theory, and experimental method in general.

I’d love to see the Disney fairies get more recognition. When we go to Disneyland, cast members always make sure to greet little girls with a hearty, “Hello Princess!” (Which, as an aside, kind of drives me nuts, because if they are princesses, then cast members should be referring to them as “your majesty.”) I’d rather be a pixie than a princess. Especially when the pixies are working hard, changing the world, and being sassy.